1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer-implemented techniques for improving the usefulness of hyperlinks in web pages.
2. Related Art
Web pages, and other kinds of hypertext documents, use textual representations of hyperlinks to indicate to the user which hyperlinks the user may follow. For example, if a web page includes the text, “Click here for more information,” the word “here” may be underlined to indicate to the user that selecting (e.g., clicking on) the word “here” will cause the web browser to navigate via a hyperlink to another web page (referred to as the “anchor” of the hyperlink).
Textual hyperlinks have proven to be extremely useful and powerful tools. In fact, in the first incarnation of the World Wide Web, web pages could only contain text. In such web pages, all hyperlinks were visually represented using text displayed with a special characteristic (e.g., underlining or a special color) indicating that the text represented a hyperlink. Textual representations of hyperlinks have the benefit, for example, of allowing hyperlinks to be visually embedded within otherwise normal prose text, such as news articles and email messages, without visually interrupting the flow of such text.
Textual representations of hyperlinks, however, have certain drawbacks. For example, the textual representation of a hyperlink may not make the destination (anchor) of the hyperlink clear to the user. In the case of the text “Click here for more information,” where the word “here” represents a hyperlink, the text does not convey the destination of the hyperlink to the user. Instead, the user only knows that clicking on the word “here” will cause the web browser to leave the current web page and navigate to another one. To identify the destination of the web page, the user may be required to navigate to that web page (by selecting the hyperlinked text) and view it, or to perform a cumbersome operation such as cutting and pasting the URL of the hyperlink into a document. In either case, it is tedious and time-consuming for the user to identify the destination of the hyperlink and therefore to decide whether to navigate to that destination.
Some have attempted to address these problems with textual representations of hyperlinks by using graphical representations of hyperlinks. For example, a picture of a person on a web page may represent a hyperlink to that person's home page. Clicking on the picture will cause the web browser to navigate to the hyperlinked home page. Graphical hyperlinks have the benefit, in comparison to purely textual hyperlinks, of providing the user with a clearer indication of the hyperlink's destination. On the other hand, graphic images must typically occupy a significant area on the web page (so-called visual “real estate”) before they can provide enough visual information to be useful to the user as an indication of the hyperlink's destination. Graphical hyperlinks, therefore, are of limited value in web pages and other situations in which visual real estate is at a premium and must be used as efficiently as possible.
What is needed, therefore, are improved techniques for providing visual representations of hyperlinks.